sell sell sell

BusinessWeek has reported that many top-level execs--including one Mark Zuckerberg--have been trying to sell some of their shares in their still private company Facebook. And guess what? Its not at the same price Microsoft bought in. Boy that's a shocker.

Last October, Microsoft bought a small stake in the wildly successful start-up that implied a total value of $15B. There were rumors that the price tag of their stake was amped up by a faux bidding war launched by Google to force Microsoft to overpay as a kind of humiliation tactic, but however you look at it, they overvalued (though they did get preferred shares with special liquidation preferences). Mark & co have reportedly been brokering their shares at as low a valuation as $3.75B, and as high as $5B. Lower-level employees will be able to sell up to 20% of their vested options at $4B starting this fall.

So what does this all mean? Is Mark finally agreeing with the pundits that social networking might not be the next Google? Their growth, along with MySpace and others, has slowed considerably over the past nine months. And their advertising platform has yet to prove very effective, although its design is quite impressive. Maybe the Facebook users are just too desensitized to care about banner ads. I know I am. Sell away boys, while you still have ten figures to your price tag.